Anyone trying to win several funding programmes in parallel trips over the same threshold sooner or later — and rarely at a convenient moment. At first glance, the European Union's de minimis rule looks like an unremarkable footnote in the grant notice: a few lines, a signature, into the drawer. In fact it is the hardest horizontal ceiling linking German and European funding programmes together. It counts across three years, across all public bodies and — the part most people underestimate — across group boundaries. Since 1 January 2024 the new Regulation (EU) 2023/2831 has applied; it raises the threshold but tightens the transparency and cumulation logic at the same time.[1]
This article places the rule in its legal context, explains the linked-enterprise test under Article 2(2) of Regulation 2023/2831, works through a practical example, and shows how to spot a looming breach in time and replan around it. The focus is on the commercial sector; agricultural and fisheries aid follow their own de minimis regulations with different thresholds and are governed by the relevant sector regulations. For manufacturing SMEs, research-active mid-sized companies and group subsidiaries, the general Regulation 2023/2831 is the central reference point for any multi-programme strategy.
What de minimis is
De minimis aid is state support that counts as "harmless" under EU state aid law because of its small volume. It is not subject to the notification requirement under Article 108(3) TFEU, because the Commission assumes it does not appreciably distort competition in the internal market. The price of that simplification is a hard quantitative ceiling: anything above the threshold automatically loses its status as permissible aid and becomes recoverable.[4]
The regime is governed today by three parallel regulations. The general de minimis regulation — Regulation (EU) 2023/2831 — has replaced the previous Regulation (EU) No 1407/2013 since 1 January 2024 and applies until 31 December 2030.[1] Alongside it sits the SGEI de minimis regulation (Regulation (EU) 2023/2832) for services of general economic interest, with its own threshold of €750,000, plus sector-specific regimes for agriculture and fisheries.[3] For classic research and innovation funding in commercial companies, the general regulation applies.
Important for placing it: de minimis sits alongside the General Block Exemption Regulation (GBER, Regulation (EU) No 651/2014), which sets its own maximum aid amounts and aid intensities for support exempt from notification. Both regimes may be used side by side — but not for the same eligible costs, where doing so would exceed the GBER intensities.[5] Anyone receiving a grant under the GBER and then taking de minimis aid for the same block of costs risks a cumulation breach.
€300,000 over three tax years
Article 3 of Regulation 2023/2831 puts the core rule in one sentence: the total de minimis aid granted by a member state to a single undertaking may not exceed €300,000 over a period of three years.[1] Two details of that wording are regularly overlooked in practice.
First, the three-year period. Unlike its predecessor, the new regulation no longer speaks of "the current and the two preceding tax years" but simply of a period of three years. What is meant is a rolling window that moves with every new act of approval.[6] The moment of granting is when the company acquires a legal right to the aid under national law — the date of the grant notice, not the date of payment.
Second, the reference to the member state. The threshold applies per member state. Anyone also receiving aid from a second EU country opens a separate envelope there — irrelevant in practice for most German SMEs, since funding programmes are overwhelmingly financed by the federal government or the states. What matters is: the Commission counts all federal, state and municipal programmes, and EU co-financed programmes approved through German bodies, into the same €300,000 pot.
For comparison: the old Regulation 1407/2013 set a ceiling of €200,000 (€100,000 for the commercial road haulage sector) and required the beneficiary to state in writing, before aid was granted, all de minimis aid received in "the two preceding tax years and the current tax year".[2] The jump to €300,000 looks like relief — but it is tied to a new transparency regime: from 1 January 2026, member states must record all de minimis aid granted in a central register, with details of the recipient, the amount, the date granted, the approving authority, the funding instrument and the NACE sector.[4] What could previously only be checked in practice through the applicant's own declaration becomes technically comparable from 2026.
Comparison matrix: the old vs the new de minimis regulation
The concept of a 'single undertaking'
This is where the real explosive charge lies. The €300,000 threshold applies not per legal person but per single undertaking within the meaning of EU state aid law. Article 2(2) of Regulation 2023/2831 defines that term as all enterprises having at least one of the following four relationships with each other — and also those having such a relationship indirectly through a third enterprise:[1]
- One enterprise holds a majority of the shareholders' or members' voting rights in another enterprise.
- One enterprise has the right to appoint or remove a majority of the members of the administrative, management or supervisory body of another enterprise.
- One enterprise has the right to exercise a dominant influence over another enterprise under a contract concluded with it or under a provision in its articles of association.
- One enterprise, being a shareholder in or member of another enterprise, controls alone, under an agreement with other shareholders or members, a majority of the voting rights.
These criteria are not plucked from the air — they take over the linked-enterprise test from Annex I of the GBER (Regulation 651/2014) and Commission Recommendation 2003/361/EC on SMEs.[5] The consequence: a holding company with several operating subsidiaries is a single undertaking; so are two sister companies under the same majority shareholder. Relationships through natural persons or family groups are in principle not caught in the commercial context, provided the enterprises concerned operate wholly or partly in the same or adjacent markets and none of the four relationships exists.
The exception for public shareholders also matters: enterprises whose only link is that each has a direct relationship with the same public body are not treated as linked.[1] Two GmbHs held by the same state holding company therefore do not automatically form a single undertaking.
The logic behind this goes back to long-standing case law of the Court of Justice on the functional concept of an undertaking. As early as Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze (C-222/04), the Court made clear that the terms "undertaking" and "economic activity" are to be interpreted in state aid law along the same lines as in competition law: what counts is the economic unit, not the formal legal form.[7] The Bundestag's research service has documented this functional approach as settled in its paper on the EU law concept of an undertaking.[8]
A practical example: application B blocks application A
The abstract rules become tangible in a case. Consider a mid-sized group of companies with three operating entities: Alpha Holding GmbH holds 100% of Beta Engineering GmbH and 100% of Gamma Software GmbH. All three are based in Germany. Beta develops test rigs for the automotive industry, Gamma develops control software. Holding, Beta and Gamma are a single undertaking under Article 2(2) of Regulation 2023/2831, because the holding company holds the majority of the voting rights in both subsidiaries.[1]
The timeline looks like this:
- July 2024: Beta receives state funding to digitalise its production (de minimis) of €140,000.
- March 2025: Gamma receives a grant for a cybersecurity consultancy project (de minimis) of €45,000.
- October 2025: Alpha Holding receives growth funding (de minimis) of €90,000.
- January 2026: Beta wants to apply for a grant for an innovation add-on — again under the de minimis regime — of €50,000.
The calculation for application B in January 2026: the rolling three-year period reaches back to January 2023. All three grants already made fall within it, since they were granted from July 2024 onwards. The total: €140,000 + €45,000 + €90,000 = €275,000. The planned new grant of €50,000 would raise the cumulative total to €325,000 — €25,000 above the threshold. The application cannot be approved at that amount if it is made solely under de minimis.[1]
The consequence reaches further: the approving authority has to check the total before issuing the notice. If it overlooks that Alpha, Beta and Gamma are a single undertaking and approves application B in full anyway, the aid is unlawful. It is then subject to recovery with interest — even many years later, if the Commission or an audit body uncovers the case. The federal funding database points out expressly in its guidance that breaches can result in full recovery.[6]
Particularly unpleasant: recovery regularly hits not only application B but can — depending on the facts — also undermine the position of legitimate expectation on application A, if it turns out the de minimis declaration made there was incomplete or incorrect. In its ruling 5 C 5.16 of 22 March 2017, the Federal Administrative Court stressed that protection of legitimate expectations is excluded by law where an administrative act was obtained by deception or incorrect statements; for grants relevant under EU state aid law, stricter standards of review apply on top.[11] The second application then makes the first vulnerable.
Documentation and certification
Regulation 2023/2831 shifts part of the documentation burden step by step from the applicant to the member state. Until the central register is operational from 1 January 2026, approving authorities still have to rely on applicants' own declarations. In Germany the procedure is largely standardised: every de minimis notice contains a certificate with the recipient, the date granted, the amount and an explicit reference to its de minimis status. The recipient has to keep that certificate for ten years and produce it on request from the Commission, the federal government, the states or the approving body.[10]
The certificate is at the same time the central instrument for the next application. Before every new de minimis approval, the company has to make a declaration listing all de minimis aid received or applied for in the relevant three-year period — including aid that went to linked companies under the single undertaking test.[9] Forms are provided by the approving bodies; in substance they follow the regulation's logic.
In practice, checking cumulation usually fails not on the rule but on the data. Typical sources of error are:
- New shareholdings: an acquisition means the de minimis aid received by the target in previous months flows into the new group's envelope. What counts is the date the aid was granted, not the date the shares were acquired.
- Notices from municipal programmes: innovation, energy or digitalisation grants from economic development bodies at city or district level are often forgotten in the declaration, because they are not centrally recorded.
- Business consultancy and start-up programmes: pure consultancy grants often run as de minimis too; they count in full towards the €300,000.
- Subsidised loans with an interest advantage: what is relevant for de minimis is not the loan amount but the gross grant equivalent — the present value of the interest advantage. Without that distinction the threshold is calculated wrongly.
With the central register under Article 6 of Regulation 2023/2831, the flow of information will change fundamentally from 2026. Approving authorities will then be able to compare the total position per single undertaking technically; the applicant's declaration serves primarily as a plausibility check.[1] For internal cumulation management that means: anyone without a real-time view of their de minimis position will be caught out faster in future.
The register obligation is anchored in Article 6 of Regulation 2023/2831; the regulation provides that member states enter de minimis aid granted into the central register within twenty working days of granting it. What is recorded includes the recipient, the amount, the date of approval, the approving authority, the funding instrument used and the NACE sector; the detailed deadlines are set out in Article 6 of Regulation 2023/2831.[1][4] Germany is expected to implement this by connecting to existing funding databases, though the specific national arrangements had not been finally published as this article went to press. What is certain is that from 2026 companies have to reckon with a considerably shorter control cycle: the data gap between self-declaration and the authorities' check shrinks from months to days.
What to do when a breach looms
If working through a planned sequence of applications shows the €300,000 threshold being reached or breached, that does not automatically mean the project cannot be funded. It means the route via de minimis ends at that point and the financing structure has to be rebuilt. Three directions work in practice.
First: switching to the GBER or a notified aid scheme. Many programmes run in their standard configuration as de minimis can alternatively be presented under Article 25 GBER (research and development) or Article 28 (innovation aid for SMEs). In substance that is often identical, but it triggers different documentation and intensity rules. The GBER knows no €300,000 total but maximum aid amounts per project and differentiated intensities by project category and SME status.[5] A grant for industrial research, for example, can be up to 50% of eligible costs under the GBER (SMEs: up to 80%) without counting towards the de minimis threshold. The precondition, though, is that the programme expressly allows that legal basis — not every directive is open to it.
Second: spreading it over time. Because the period is rolling, older aid drops out of the calculation window after three years. Anyone breaching the threshold narrowly can check whether an application can be postponed by a few months until older de minimis approvals have aged out. It is not an elegant solution, but combined with clean project planning it is sometimes the most pragmatic.
Third: consolidating within the group. Where cumulation across sister companies looms, it is worth checking whether the project should not be located with a single entity in any case for commercial reasons. That does not avoid the single undertaking test — that still applies — but it makes internal allocation easier and stops small consultancy grants in one subsidiary using up the envelope for strategically important innovation funding in another.
Fourth: splitting by eligible costs. Where a project covers different blocks of cost — staff for preliminary research, investment in test rigs and consultancy on market entry, say — individual blocks can often be assigned to separate aid regimes. Research staff costs run under Article 25 GBER, the investment under an investment programme with its own legal basis, the consultancy stays under de minimis. The GBER's cumulation prohibition expressly forbids only funding the same eligible costs simultaneously beyond the applicable intensity limit.[5] Separating costs cleanly in the application therefore opens room that is lost when everything is booked as de minimis.
From a compliance point of view the task reduces to three questions that have to be answered before every application: who belongs to my single undertaking? What de minimis aid has flowed into that group over the last three years? Which legal basis carries the new application if the threshold gets too tight? Asking these questions alongside the project rather than at the moment of the notice considerably reduces the risk of a later recovery. Because unlawful aid protects no expectations.[11]
One last point often underestimated in day-to-day practice: the de minimis certificate always states the gross approved amount, not the amount actually drawn down. If an approved grant is only partly used, or even returned in full, the original de minimis attribution stands as long as the approving authority does not formally revoke it. Companies that end funded projects early or voluntarily do not draw down funds should therefore also check the certificate and, where appropriate, apply for an adjustment. Otherwise the unused aid keeps tying up threshold budget in the calculation window that will be needed for the next application.[10]
The same applies in mirror image to aid that is recovered. If an earlier de minimis payment is recovered after review by the Commission or an audit body, the economic advantage does not merely shrink — interest is charged on top at the EU reference rate. The federal funding database notes that breaches of the de minimis rule may lead to recovery with interest at market rates, which appreciably increases the pure amount of the loss.[6] That applies too where the breach is only discovered years after the approval.
The new Regulation 2023/2831 brings a higher threshold, but also a more precise set of control instruments. Anyone intending to apply systematically for research and innovation programmes needs reliable internal cumulation management from 2026 — not as a bureaucratic exercise but as a basis for decisions: which application uses up which envelope, which one opens room for the next? The de minimis trap is not a fault in the system. It is the system. Understanding it means planning better.
- [1]Commission Regulation (EU) 2023/2831 of 13 December 2023 on de minimis aidEUR-Lex · Official Journal of the EU · 2023Open source
- [2]Commission Regulation (EU) No 1407/2013 of 18 December 2013 (the old de minimis regulation, in force until 31 December 2023)EUR-Lex · Official Journal of the EU · 2013Open source
- [3]Commission Regulation (EU) 2023/2832 of 13 December 2023 (SGEI de minimis, €750,000)EUR-Lex · Official Journal of the EU · 2023Open source
- [4]Summary: the de minimis rule — exempting small amounts of aid from the notification requirementEUR-Lex · European Commission · 2024Open source
- [5]Regulation (EU) No 651/2014 (GBER) — de minimis vs block exemption; the prohibition on cumulation for the same eligible costsEUR-Lex · Official Journal of the EU · 2014Open source
- [6]Federal funding database: de minimis aid — national guidanceBMWK · Förderdatenbank · 2024Open source
- [7]Court of Justice, judgment of 10 January 2006, Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze and others, C-222/04: the functional concept of an undertaking in state aid lawCourt of Justice of the European Union · 2006Open source
- [8]The EU law concept of an undertaking and its transferability (paper PE 6 — 3000 — 187/14)German Bundestag · research service · 2014Open source
- [9]Guidance note on de minimis rules (BA 146949)Federal Employment Agency · 2024Open source
- [10]NBank de minimis information sheet (as at 2026) — certification obligation, three-year periodNBank (Investment and Development Bank of Lower Saxony) · 2026Open source
- [11]Federal Administrative Court, judgment of 22 March 2017, 5 C 5.16 — withdrawal of favourable administrative acts and legitimate expectationsFederal Administrative Court · 2017Open source
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